His 325-member IT department, which serves 51,000-member NYPD, is busy on a variety of projects -- some catch-up, some cutting-edge. Meanwhile, Onalfo is barnstorming the country drumming up moral and financial support for even more ambitious plans.
"IT is very strategic to the NYPD," Onalfo said Tuesday at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders conference in Palm Desert, Calif. "You can't even arrest someone today without the aid of IT."
Some projects in progress include doubling the number of PCs in precinct offices, creating a database of all weapons used in crimes in New York and adding wireless hot-spot capability to all precinct offices and police cars. Those are in addition to continuing to enhance the Crime Data Warehouse that supports the two-year old RTCC, which Onalfo describes as a "NASA-type control room" with multiple large screens to help police analysts map and analyze data quickly to help detectives during the crucial first 48 hours after a crime.
Onalfo also wants to put 15,000 handheld PCs into the hands of beat cops so they can quickly get data about possible criminals and criminal activity, and he wants license-plate readers mounted on police cars to aid in making arrests.
The 67-year-old Onalfo, a longtime private-sector CIO at companies such as Kraft Foods International Inc. and The Stanley Works, came out of retirement four years ago to lead the NYPD's technology transformation. Nowadays, he says, better safety for New Yorkers is "my ROI."
But the RTCC and Onalfo's other achievements almost didn't happen. "I went to the police commissioner on my first day and said, 'I quit,'" Onalfo recalls. "And he asked why, and I told him because we had no disaster recovery plan at all. A simple fire in the computer room, and we would be out of business."
Onalfo no longer has to grandstand, but he is still playing catch-up in many areas. For instance, the NYPD is in the midst of a $40 million project with Microsoft Corp. to install a total of 15,000 PCs over the next 18 months. "Can you imagine going to work and standing in line to use the computer?" he asked.
By doubling the number of PCs, many police officers will have easy access to e-mail and Microsoft desktop applications for the first time, along with hosted services through the NYPD intranet. The hope is that this will allow precincts to finally eliminate typewritten case reports. The PCs will be secured through a combination of fingerprint biometrics and chips on officers' IDs. Networks at precinct offices are also being upgraded from Token Ring technology to Ethernet, bringing them from 4Mbit/sec. to 100Mbit/sec.
The NYPD also recently upgraded all of its mainframes to IBM z990 systems, some of them running Linux. The big challenge there has been finding staffers who can run them. "I even have some guys at the nursing home who still come to work every day for us," he said.
In other areas, the NYPD is ahead of most Fortune 500 companies. It is in the midst of a $6 million project to build satellite communication systems for backups in case of emergencies. The department also recently installed million-dollar software that helps identify people and link their various identities by matching aliases, Social Security numbers and addresses.
The tool was first built for casinos to track big winners who have been banned but try to return to gamble under a different name, according to Onalfo. Running the software through the arrest and arraignment databases helped the NYPD create a clean database of 2 million unique criminal records -- eliminating 7 million duplicates. Onalfo also hopes to apply digital voice recognition to recorded emergency 911 calls in order to more easily search and store them, and his dream project is equipping NYPD's beat police with handheld devices.
There are, not surprisingly, similarities between Onalfo's NYPD job and his old private-sector posts. He leverages the NYPD "brand" to negotiate vendor deals. And he insists that all projects be broken down into manageable phases to lower the risk of failure.
But there are differences, too. A lot of decisions, even to promote employees, are out of his hands. And "at my first meeting, everybody was wearing their guns," Onalfo said. "I asked them to put their safeties on because I didn't want someone to pull out their weapon and say they disagreed with me."